Pig's Foot (6 page)

One day during their afternoon stroll, the Kortico broke with his usual routine. Leaving his wife sitting with her sister on the grass, he took José aside and said, ‘I never thanked you, José.'

‘Thanked me for what?'

‘For Malena. You were right. She is the only good thing that has ever happened to me.'

‘Thank you, too,' said José.

‘Me?'

‘Yes. Thank you for rescuing me when I was wandering the streets.'

Oscar smiled, showing the brilliant white teeth he had recently discovered in his mouth.

‘You know something?' said José. ‘If you carry on like this, you're in danger of becoming a good man.'

The two men hugged. Oscar wrapped his arms around the Mandinga's waist, and his friend bent down to complete the embrace.

11 April 1898

Time, as it always does, continued to pass and so arrived the year of 1898 which began with an incident that was to change for ever the history of Cuba. I’m talking about the battleship USS
Maine
sailing into Havana harbour.

After thirty years of war against Spain, people had become immune to threats of annihilation. By now, both Martí and Maceo were dead and the population of Cuba was barely one and a half million. They say the centre of the island and all points east had been completely destroyed, that it looked like a vast rubble heap. February came and the yellow press began to speculate. Some said the warship had come to help us, others that it had come to overthrow us. On 15 February, the world exploded and shards of the battleship were scattered everywhere. Some two hundred Americans died: the United States blamed Spain; Spain blamed the United States. Eventually the USA, deciding to enter the war, began to arm the fleet and . . . What the hell am I doing talking about the USS
Maine
? Sorry, sometimes when I’m on a roll I get muddled and end up talking shit. It tends to happen when I’m hungry, because food, for me, is sacred. I swear, I’m capable of killing someone for food; I’m serious. It’s like that time back in primary school when I wrung the neck of that fucking cat for eating my lunch. But anyway, back to the story . . .

In April, while the whole thing about the USS
Maine
was still kicking off, Oscar and Malena were preparing for the momentous changes in their future. Malena was only seven months pregnant, but her belly was huge; she looked as though she might give birth at any minute. This in fact proved to be true, though no one knew it then. So, on that April morning, José and Betina set off walking to El Cobre with little Gertrudis, without the faintest idea of what the coming hours would bring.

The sun had risen early, lighting up the hills, the red earth of the Callejón de la Rosa, and the shacks of the little village. The day was set fair and the child of Oscar and Malena seemed ready to be born since, from early that morning, it began to kick and prod, desperate to get out of its mother’s belly. Oscar immediately went to fetch Ester the midwife who arrived within five minutes, nervous and agitated, her eyes sharp and shining. She kneeled between Malena’s legs, slipped a hand inside her and whispered: ‘The baby’s coming. Fetch some water.’

Ester shooed away the cockroaches crawling over the bed, the wooden floor and in the dark corners while Oscar dashed out with a bucket to the village well twenty yards from his shack, and he could still hear his wife’s howls of pain as he ran. Within ten minutes he came back to find the midwife not where he left her, but standing at the head of the bed. Ester was still shaking nervously.

‘What’s happening?’ asked Oscar, setting down the pail of water.

‘Nothing, I was just wiping sweat from her forehead. Bring the pail over here.’ Ester washed her hands. She seemed awkward, as though this were her first childbirth. ‘Push hard,’ she said. Malena began to push, screaming so loudly the walls of the shack trembled. She was poorly nourished and her body shuddered with every push as though she were losing slivers of life. The baby’s enormous, bald head popped out, eyes tight shut, and clearly in distress.

‘Come on, push!’ screamed Ester. ‘He’s coming!’

The broad-shouldered baby did not seem to want to come out. Oscar did not have the courage to say anything. He simply stood, as though hypnotised, staring at his child’s head between his wife’s legs; he clutched Malena’s hand and did his best to ignore her blood-curdling howls. Ester pulled the baby by the head and Malena writhed in agony until, in a final effort, they managed to get the baby out.

‘It’s a boy!’ the midwife said with a smile. ‘It’s a boy, Malena. A healthy baby boy, and big too. The worst is over now.’

Ester was about to cut the umbilical cord. ‘Not yet, Ester. Leave him attached to me a little longer.’ Malena held out her thin arms and Ester handed her the child. Still Oscar said nothing, staring down not at his son, but at the dark body of his wife which looked frighteningly delicate framed against the white sheets streaked red with blood.

As Malena held him up to her face, the baby began to wail. Slowly, he opened his dark eyes and looked at his mother who smiled up at him weakly. For what seemed an eternity they stared at each other as mother and child met for the first time. Then Malena glanced at her husband. ‘You have to be strong, Oscar. Never forget that I loved you from the first day I met you. When he grows up, tell Benicio to be even-tempered. Tell him that, and let him be a comfort to you too. Tell him avenging past wrongs brings only present suffering. Tell him that.’

Before Oscar had time to take in these words, Malena’s voice flickered out as though someone had snuffed a candle; her hands slipped to let her son’s body rest on hers. She was dead.

‘Malena! No, Malena, no! Please God, no!’ Ester shook her, but it was useless. Oscar fell to his knees, still staring straight ahead; he shed no tears. In his place, another man would have roared, tried to revive his wife, thrown water in her face, run for help, slapped her if he had to. But Oscar did not move. He simply stared at the same fixed point: at his wife’s eyes, suddenly lifeless.

‘I swear I don’t know how this happened, Oscar. In all my years as a midwife, I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘Cut the cord.’

‘Oscar, think about what you’re going to . . .’

‘I don’t want to think. Cut the cord right now and leave, I’ll take care of everything.’

Ester did as she was asked. Quickly, as though he had suddenly emerged from his trance, Oscar got to his feet and walked Ester to the door.

‘Maybe she was undernourished,’ said Ester. Oscar was not listening. He paid her for her services, and then coldly told her to leave, saying that he would take care of everything. When Ester was only a speck on the horizon, he went back inside his shack, removed the pig’s-foot amulet he had inherited from his mother, and hung it around his son’s neck. He propped up his wife’s body so that he could continue to gaze into her dead eyes, then lay down next to her, with the baby between them, suckling at Malena’s breast.

Some hours later José and Betina arrived back from El Cobre. The blood that had coursed from Oscar’s veins now formed a vast pool that spread across the floor of royal palm. The bodies of Oscar and Malena were cold, their skin purplish-yellow; a swarm of blowflies and cockroaches were already feeding on the putrefaction.

One by one the people of Pata de Puerco, heads bowed, dressed in their Sunday best, walked in a slow procession past the house where José and Betina kept vigil in the silence only death can create. Afterwards, the bodies were carried in a cortège to the ruins of the old sugar plantation where Oscar had been born and where, on José’s instructions, they were to be laid to rest.

Oscar Kortico and Malena de Flores died on 11 April 1898, the day on which their son – my grandpa Benicio – was born and the very day the United States Congress, in the wake of the explosion of the USS
Maine
, drafted a joint resolution stipulating that, from that moment, Cuba was to be a free and independent nation.

Melecio is Different

And that is all there is to say about Oscar and his wife Malena. So much love and so much pain and all for nothing. These days, no one dies of passion as they did then; in 1995 people get married just for the extra rations of beer and cake, just to throw a party. And I’ve always said that life does not believe in love, life does not believe in anyone, and that when you least expect it, you find yourself six feet under. Basically, love is something that hurts like fuck and soon becomes a memory, and memories, as we all know, are fleeting and almost always fade. I’ve only ever been in love once, with a beautiful mixed-race girl called Elena. In fact, she turned out to be a complete bitch. But that’s a different story, one that later, if I’ve a mind to, I’ll tell you.

Let’s move on. Malena died, Oscar died, the
Maine
was blown up. The Yanks –
Yumas
we call them – joined forces with Calixto García and his troops to kick the Spanish out of Cuba. Calixto blockaded Santiago and the whole surrounding region while the Americans blockaded the western part of the island, especially the port of Havana. A contingent of Americans landed in the east to meet up with Calixto García and together they agreed to take the small villages around Santiago. First they took San Juan, then El Caney, and then one by one they took every town until they came to El Cobre.

Spain ordered its naval fleet to break the cordon and abandon the port of Santiago, but in less than an hour the American fleet destroyed what had once been the powerful
marina española
. Everyone knows what happened next: the Americans shat on their pact with Cuba and wiped their arse with the joint resolution, the Cuban national anthem was not heard again – instead sovereignty of the island was transferred to the United States and Cuba ceased to be a Spanish colony only to become an American dependency. Then came the Platt Amendment. Anyway, this is what was happening – or rather what was happening in the rest of the island since nothing ever happened in Pata de Puerco.

Demand for sugar increased. More schools and hospitals were built for the wealthy minority. Nobody took any notice of the families of a remote village that kept its existence a secret from the rest of the island. No one arrived to plant sugar cane, to lay claim to the land. No streetlights came. Since the wave of immigration that had brought the Santacruz and the Jabao families, no one left Pata de Puerco and no one arrived and quickly the families began to intermarry: cousins with cousins, uncles with nieces, everything was permitted except brothers marrying sisters which was considered a mortal sin. Over time, it became easy to identify the members of any family by their characteristic features.

When Malena and Oscar died, Betina wept continually for three weeks. She lost her appetite, she lost weight, and neglected her appearance more than ever. José too was much affected, but Betina was in such a state that he had to set aside his own grief in order to care for his wife, who was about to give birth. Several times, he tried to persuade her to take a bath, telling her he could not bear for such a beautiful woman to have a forest of hair under her arms, to smell unwashed, to look like a beggar. The Mandingas had always been a proud family. What would the neighbours say, those same people who had always thought of the Mandingas as the guiding force in Pata de Puerco? What sort of example was she setting for Gertrudis, who worshipped her mother? What had become of the radiant woman with whom José had fallen in love?

Betina talked to her husband about a conversation she had had with Juanita, a
santera
and wise-woman who lived alone and spent her time tending mysterious plants in her garden. Juanita thought of herself as a cynical pessimist, but she had a keen eye capable of diagnosing disease and in Pata de Puerco it was she who tended to the health of the community. More than once she had said that Cuba was a cesspool and she was simply waiting for her plants, her bird-of-paradise flowers and her orchids, to grow so she could die in peace. She invariably wore a housecoat that reeked of alcohol and wandered around with a cigar hanging from her lips.

‘Juanita told me that all this time the truth has been staring us in the face, but we would not see it,’ Betina told her husband. José said she should pay no mind to Juanita whose brain was addled by the strange herbs she smoked, but instead accept things as they are. Death sometimes comes unexpectedly, he said, and once again reminded her how his parents had perished of yellow fever, adding that his twin brothers had died of that terrible disease. ‘You have to remember you are about to give birth.’

This seemed to calm her for a while, but the following day Betina’s head was once again plagued with ghosts and suspicions; Malena had not been herself for a long time, she insisted, her sister had become more withdrawn as though afraid to speak, afraid to look her in the eye. Betina had known something was wrong, but every time she raised the subject her sister said she was imagining things.

‘Malena died in childbirth,
mi amor
,’ said José. ‘You know how delicate she was.’ But Betina, with the wilfulness of pregnant women, insisted no one died in childbirth just like that. To calm her, José went to fetch Ester so the midwife could tell her exactly what had happened.

‘I warned Oscar. I told him that Malena needed to eat more red meat,’ said Ester.

‘No one could have eaten more red meat than Malena did,’ said José.